Larry Page’s vision of future looks a lot like John Maynard Keynes’

When the machines take over, we’ll all be better off because we can finally work less.

Google co-founder Larry Page espoused this theory last week during a talk at a Khosla Ventures Summit. It’s also an idea that the economist John Maynard Keynes floated nearly a century ago, in his essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.”

Page, speaking with venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and his Google co-founder Sergey Brin, suggested that as technology replaces the amount of total amount of work available, work will be spread out among available workers, giving everyone blissfully less work to do.

“Most people like working, but they’d also like to have more time with their family or to pursue their own interests,” said Page. “So that would be one way to deal with the problem, is if you had a coordinated way to just reduce the workweek.”

Everyone likes their leisure time, suggests Page, and the technology takeover would be just like scoring a whole bunch of extra vacation time.

In 1930, Keynes, whose ideas were at that time still a dominant influence on economic policy, thought pretty much the same thing. Technological progress, he offered, was the key to finally achieving that version of utopia where money is no longer the driving force of society and scarcity is replaced by abundance.

He argued that the innovations of the 19th century — electricity, machinery, mass production — would cause the global economy to increase by seven and a half times over the next century. And with further innovation, most of us would wind up working only 15 hours a week. (And “three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!” he wrote.)

Keynes was so convinced of this coming era of leisure that he fretted over the potential problems that all of this free time might create.

“For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem-how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure,” he wrote.

Of course, as we draw near to the end of Keynes’ century, it is abundantly clear that his vision was never quite realized. The United States’ GDP may have reached the levels of Keynes’ prophecy, but we also work much more, and, it stands to reason, enjoy leisure less often.

Keynes’ essay has largely been written off by economists of the modern era. It failed to account for problems such as income distribution, but also overestimated the desires of people to stop working.

“On a first reading, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ seemed prophetic,” wrote the economist John Quiggin. “Yet, 40 or so years later, I am a grandparent myself, the year 2030 is rapidly approaching, and Keynes’s vision seems further from reality than ever.”

Keynes was one of the first to spark discussion of on how technological process could impact living standards. But he also didn’t account for how technological progress would change those standards.

Machine learning will inevitably replace more and more jobs, just like, as Khosla is fond of pointing out, machines replaced 19th century farmers.

But, as Quiggin points out, in the 19th century, at the same time farmers were massively displaced by machines, “the Industrial Revolution spurred an intensification of work that was almost unparalleled in human history.”

In other words, people find a way to work.

Along those lines, Brin took issue with his co-founder’s perspective.

“I don’t think that in the near term the need for labor is going away,” he said. “It gets shifted from one place to another, but people always want more stuff or more entertainment or more creativity or more something.”